


The Lazarus Sequence

by CandlestickMaker



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Boarding School, Clones, F/F, Family, Post-Canon, Post-Series, Science Fiction, cophine - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-01 23:42:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13305831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CandlestickMaker/pseuds/CandlestickMaker
Summary: Sarah, Alison, and Helena are dead.Delphine and Cosima, home from their travels in South America, try to give Charlotte a normal life.But while she's way at school, she and Kira make a life-altering discovery:Sarah, Alison, and Helena may have been dead.But something is bringing them back to life.(An alternate post-Season 4 story, with elements of Season 5 carried over.)





	1. Chapter 1

Delphine had a routine in Burlington: maple latte, Arcadia, wait. The latte was sweet and warm and something she only ever really craved here in the crisp, brilliant autumns of the American northeast. The heat and the decadence of it reminded her of Toronto and the many mornings (though not nearly enough) when she and Cosima would bundle against the cold to visit their favorite coffeeshop. They had friends there. A community. 

A community who started to note just exactly how many similarities Cosima shared with their “daughter”: too many.

So they’d moved to Arizona, where the air was dry and warm and good for Cosima’s lungs. But even in a new place, with a new haircut on Charlotte and Cosima’s dreads going grayer ever day, the indenticality of the clones drew unwanted attention, and few solutions were attractive. the original solution had been for Charlotte to split her time between Cosima's, Alison's, and Mrs. S's. But then.... There was only Cosima. When she married Delphine she made it clear: two Ledas for the price of one. Delphine was more than happy to accept, and started making decisions about the young clone's fate immediately. 

Delphine would not allow Marion Bowles back into Charlotte’s life, on that she was firm. Though no evidence of foul play ever presented itself in her daughter, the austere woman made Delphine’s skin crawl. She didn’t know of any Ledas left in Europe, and it seemed cruel to send Charlotte to South America where she would have to learn an entirely new language, culture and role. The sestras of South America had seen Charlotte as a leader, since she arrived with Cosima and Delphine, but she was just a girl. A young woman, maybe, but their little girl. Perverse as it may have been, biologically, Cosima had come to regard the youngest clone as her daughter. 

With the steady stream of DYAD hush money coming in, it ended up being a relatively easy decision to send Charlotte to the Academy in Vermont. 

It had been harder to convince Cal to let Kira out of his sight and attend as well, but something tipped the scales. Cosima thought it was Delphine. Delphine thought it was Cosima.

It was Cal who Delphine met at Arcadia Books every time Parents’ Day or Drop-Off or Pick-Up or Christmas rolled around. The bell above the door jingled merrily as she stepped in, a breeze of cool October air chasing after her. A red-headed and visibly flushed young woman flipped her hair flirtatiously as she tried to explain the merits of Steinbeck to Cal. For his part, he indulged her, which made Delphine chuckle; Call was not a book kind of guy unless it was a comic book or a drone user’s manual. He looked up to see her, relieved.  
“Del!” His arms opened wide, nearly taking up the entire tiny bookstore with their span.  
“Bonjour, Cal,” Delphine kissed him on the cheek and then the other, the entire display thoroughly French. the redhead sulked away. Such was the effect of Doctor Delphine Cormier on other women: devastation. They either fell immediately, eventually, or didn’t even bother to compete.

“How’s Cosima?” Cal asked, a frown starting in his brow.  
“She’s…well she wishes she were here. I believe her exact words were, ‘Fuck it, I’ve only got a year left anyway’.”  
Cal chuckled despite himself, something Delphine had always appreciated. More than once, Cosima had publicly (and drunkenly) given Delphine her blessing to “shack up” with Cal after she “kicked it”. Sara had enthusiastically (and even more drunkenly) agreed, eliminating the caveat of death altogether.  
“If I had you two alone in a room, yeh?” she would slur.

“And you?” Delphine asked gently, “How have you and Kira been?”  
Cal ran a hand through his hair, and only then did Delphine notice how long it had gotten. How gray at the roots near his temples. How his beard was becoming speckled with silver.  
“I think I’ve been dealing with it. But Kira…I don’t know if Kira has really….”  
The bell above the door jingled.  
“Maman!”  
How many years now had Delphine stared at this face and all its variations? How well did she know every detail of its biology, its biochemistry, its anatomy and neurology? And yet still every time her daughter loped toward her she was amazing by her individuality. The specific way she moved and spoke and smiled. Her unique tastes and distastes. The seamless and tripping way she flitted between English and French, a feat neither of her mothers could pull off—Delphine with her French-accented English, and Cosima with her abysmal attempts at French.  
“Ma fille,” Delphine kissed the top of Charlotte’s hair and wrapped her arms around her daughter’s shoulders. Only a couple more inches, she thought, and you’ll be exactly the height of Cosima. She released Charlotte and turned to Kira.  
“Kira, darling.”  
“Hey Delphine,” the young woman walked into Delphine’s arms. Her own mother’s features were starting to emerge in Kira’s dark eyed face. She’d inherited her father’s seriousness, but the teeth and the lips were all Sarah: sharp and deadset but easily coaxed into a wry smile. She wore her mother’s leather jacket today. It still smelled like Sarah, even a decade later.  
“How are you, ma petite?”  
“Okay.”  
Delphine immediately saw what Cal was talking about: too bright, too sure. The voice of a girl who had never known tragedy. But Kira’s whole life was tragedy. She was ignoring it. Repressing it. She was not well.  
“Maman, we need to talk,” Charlotte intoned.  
“Sure. I thought you and I could got to lunch and then we’d all—“  
“No, I think…all four of us. Should talk.”  
Cal and Delphine shared a look, their daughters shoulder to shoulder before them. Kira’s fingers picked nervously at the strap of her messenger bag. Charlotte’s gaze was steady, measured, and for one second Delphine swore she could see a fiery glint of Cosima in them.  
“It’s about Mom,” said Kira. Cal flinched ever so slightly, though it was not lost on any of the present company.  
“Kira, I think—“  
“She’s alive,” Charlotte clarified.

—//—

Coming back from the bathroom, Delphine found Cal at the bar throwing down a more than medicinal portion of whiskey.  
“Cal,” she put her hand on his arm.  
“If I have to listen to whatever I”m about to listen to, I’m not doing it at least a little bit drunk.”  
That seemed reasonable.  
“Another whatever that was and a glass of Cabernet,” she told the bartender.

The joined the girls at the table, their return diffusing the quiet but heated chatter that simmered between them. Orders had been laced. The time had arrived.  
“So,” Delphine began. A flash of a memory at the sound of her own stately voice: endless briefing meetings at DYAD, stale coffee, struggling to stay engaged. “Sarah is alive.”  
Kira perked up, encouraged that he aunt hadn’t phrased it as a question, hadn’t tinged it with doubt.  
“Yes.”  
“Have you seen here? Or was it—“  
“No, Maman, it wasn’t one of Kira’s visions. It was real. I saw her, too.”  
“You know it was Sarah?”  
“I know my own mother,” Kira quipped.  
“Kira—“  
“It’s okay, Cal,” Delphine jumped in quickly, “I understand. But, Kira…it’s…. I think I know my own wife every day. My own daughter. But even today, just now, Charlotte—“  
“Not to mention if you’re looking for someone,” Cal went on.  
“Dad. I wasn’t looking for her. I thought she was just as dead as you did but she isn’t. We saw her together. Both of us. We talked to her.”  
“What did she say?” Cal’s eyes licked their chops.  
Kira faltered. She looked into her lap and picked at her nails. Tears, Delphine could see, crowded her eyes.  
“She didn’t recognize us. Or remember us. Or whatever,” Charlotte said for her. “She didn’t even realize we’re…identical. She didn’t know who she was or what she looked like or anything. It was weird.”  
Cal scraped the bottom of his tumbler in lazy circles on the table.  
“You didn’t think to call me immediately.”  
“Dad—“  
“Kira.”  
Delphine and Charlotte flickered a look to each other, familiar but still uncomfortable with the tense relationship that had come between Kira and Cal in the last few years.

When Sarah didn’t return from that island, Cal and the Ledas had given her up for dead. It would have been suicide to return. A sacrifice made in vain if they’d tried to go back and rescue her. But Kira insisted that she was alive. That when she fell from the cliff she hadn’t died. That Rachel hadn’t found her and finished her off. Kira had screamed and cried. She’d plotted ways to go there herself. Obsessively she’d tracked her own dreams and visions, and no one listened. Her father stuck her in round after round of specialized therapy, separated her from her aunts and cousins. Kira hadn’t forgotten. Now at the age of seventeen, nearly liberated from her father’s watchful control, she was just trying to keep the peace and not burn a bridge.

“You don’t think it was another Leda?” Delphine diffused.  
Kira shook her head.  
“It was her. For sure.”  
Charlotte felt Cal’s eyes on her face, joined by Delphine. She understood but resented their doubt. Kira, of all the Ledas and their variations, had always been right.  
She looked up to meet their conjoined gave, aware of the effect her face had on the two adults.  
“I know it’s not…going to convince you for me to tell you it was her. It’s not enough.”  
Delphine felt a swell of pride. Her daughter was wise beyond her years.  
“But Sarah is alive, and…” she looked to Kira, who nodded something secret to her cousin. “And that’s not even the weirdest part.”

—//—

Cosima stalked moodily around the house, baked as the red Arizona dirt. She had the house to herself all weekend, which ten years ago she might have relished, but nowadays could only resent. Delphine was away, which brought up unpleasant memories by itself, not to mention the fact that she was away visiting their daughter. Alone. As in: without Cosima.

To her credit, Cosima’s wife had done her damnedest to soften the blow, making sure Cosima was stocked with the finest marijuana DYAD reparation money could buy, and permission to finish that Netflix British procedural alone—usually a cardinal sin in the Niehaus-Cormier household. They were still stuck on season three of Game of Thrones since they could only watch it at Christmas time when Charlotte was home.

Cosima wandered into their master bedroom and tossed her cell phone on the bed. Unmade, like she’d have it every day if Delphine hadn’t forcibly made her adopt the habit of making it every morning. Not making it was a small act of rebellion, but an unsatisfying one since even looking at it was making her fingers itch to pull the sheets straight and tight.

Might as well, she resigned. At least it’d kill two minutes.

With the bed made (exactly two minutes later), Cosima sat at the foot and stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows. The afternoon sun sizzled mercilessly on the endless earth, the sky so intensely blue it hurt to look at. It was nothing like San Francisco. Nothing like Minneapolis. Nothing like Toronto. It might as well have been Mars.  
“It’s not a prison,” Delphine had said when they first moved in.  
“Then why do I feel like I’m being punished?”  
She’d been trying to make a point, but Delphine, mistress of diversion, had used the mention of punishment as a handy segue to breaking in the new bedroom.

Even now the memory sent a thrill through Cosima’s stomach. She fell back on the bed dramatically, smiling though no one was there to see it.

She checked her phone for news from Delphine or Charlotte or both. A selfie. A text. A missed call. Anything. But nothing waited for her on the device. Just the lock screen photo of Felix and Sarah from what must have been a hundred years ago: the most unflattering of selfies from a series of a million. Undoubtedly Sarah’s idea, the diabolical duo had hijacked Cosima’s phone at some indistinct moment of opportunity and filled the screen with their flared, grotesque nostrils and squid-like eyes. The image alarmed strangers but delighted Cosima. And made her heart ache for her sister.

The loneliness compounded itself in the pit of her stomach and Cosima could imagine herself sinking into the enormous bed and letting herself go comatose until Delphine came home. She could watch the sun move through the entire sky from here if she so chose. South-facing windows. It’d be a good show….

The comfortable weight of her resolve settled into her bones—to give into it, to let the next couple of days go to waste, to let her mind wear itself out on thoughts of Sarah and Helena and Alison…all dead…all the set-up to a great biological joke which was Cosima’s ironic longevity.

Her lungs rattled on the inhale, and she reflexively sat up to cough them back into working order. But one barking cough was all it took. Psychosomatic.

It’s not a prison.

Cosima stared out the window at the reddish desert and crackling blue sky.

No, it wasn’t a prison. It was a gift. A gift to be alive and stuck at home because her daughter was thriving and her wife was going to see her and the only reason Cosima couldn’t go with was because Charlotte’s uncanny resemblance to her meant she was healthy. Progressing normally, whatever “normal” meant.

The chain of thoughts did nothing for the ache and the heaviness in her heart, but it did motivate her muscles to lift her bones off the bed and out onto the balcony on the other side of the glass. 

Out from the shade of the roof Cosima strolled, leaning on the railing to survey the limitless desert landscape that sprawled around their home. The sun melted the ice in her veins and dried the cold sweat on her palms, and she closed her eyes to listen for the cosmic hum of the planets in their orbits.

So intensely was she listening for a sound she could never conceivably hear that she missed the gentle buzz of her phone in the sheets of her bed, heralding the message from Delphine that was about to catapult them into a brave, new, terrifying world, even more alien than Arizona:

Have you heard of the Lazarus sequence?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A secret link between the Ledas may be their only chance. But at what cost?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, y'all! I'm new to this and trying to get better at keeping a regular schedule. Your comments keep me honest, so let me know what you think!

It felt like old times, when she would email Cosima an entire dossier on the secure DYAD network. Although now of course it wasn’t the DYAD network. It was their own. A closed intranet, available to sestras only. A parting gift from Mika.

The dossier was admittedly very sparse.

“This is all you have?” Delphine asked her daughter.  
“Well between the 4.0 I’m maintaining, extra-curricular and a normal social life, yeah. We haven’t had a lot of time to weakend on the coast of Maine and spy on defunct Neolution bunkers.”She knew she shouldn’t, but Delphine chuckled at Charlotte’s sass.  
“Cosima’s calling,” said Kira beside Charlotte.  
A video box popped into view.  
“Allo, Cosima.”  
“Are you guys shitting me with this?”  
“I wish,” said Charlotte.  
“Hi, Char. How’s school?”  
“Good, but not as interesting as this.”  
“Been there.”  
“Oui,” Delphine said mostly to herself, eyes still gliding over the dossier.  
“I like your hair. It looks like—“  
“Mom’s, I know.”  
“Pretty trippy to see the magic hair on my own face.”  
“That’s what’s trippy? Not the fact that our sisters are coming back from the dead?”  
Cosima made an unimpressed, distinctly gastro-intestinal sound. “That is trip-lite, my tiny dude.”  
Charlotte squinted and leaned in close to the laptop monitor.  
“Are you…high?”  
“Yes.” No point lying, she figured.  
“Okay…maybe we should call back?”  
“Non. She does excellent work when she’s not completely sober,” Delphine chimed in at last. “Did you read the file, Cosima?”  
“Yeah. But I’ll be honest: I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. Even if I were sober this is….”  
“Trippy?” Charlotte smirked.  
“Mm,” Delphine nodded seriously. Her wife and daughter could practically hear her brain whirring.  
“Here’s what we think—me and Kira. The Ledas…okay well wait I have to start with Westmoreland.”  
“Westmoreland?” Cosima’s jaw dropped.  
“Yeah. Just…hold on. Kira and I did some digging. About the island. The land obviously belonged to Westmoreland, but before him…it belonged to a group of Transcendentalists. Artists, mostly. Some of them were loosely connected to some occult stuff, but mostly artists who believed in an intersection between science and the divine. They used it as a sort of commune base until Westmoreland came through, and his wife turned out to be even more of a Neolution fanatic than he was. She didn’t want to focus on just self-directed evolution. She wanted to eliminate the need for rudimentary survival altogether. She wanted to end death.”  
“She swallowed the Transcendentalists hook, line, and sinker,” said Cosima. A chill ran through Delphine’s core.  
Charlotte nodded and went on, “There were two strains of experiments: live test subjects and deceased. Westmoreland himself was the live subject. And if it had gone according to plan…we would have been the deceased subjects. The idea behind cloning in the first place was to—“  
“Have a control,” Delphine’s mind raced aloud.  
“Exactly,” said Charlotte, “So long as we die of natural causes, we’re still eligible for experimentation.”  
“So no Beth,” said Cosima quietly.  
Charlotte stopped short. Kira froze.  
Beside her, Delphine sipped in a small breath and tensed.  
“Wh-who is Beth?” Charlotte asked after a moment of silence.  
“You didn’t know her, ma petite. She was another one of your sisters. Very brave. But very troubled.”  
Delphine watched Cosima on the screen, looking for the glazed eyes and pale lips that meant darkness and heaviness in her wife. Beth and Cosima had been close. Triplets, they would joke with Alison. Delphine herself had never known Elizabeth Childs, but she knew very well the pain her death had caused her Canadian sisters. The depression they’d fallen prey to.  
And then when Alison died….  
When Sarah came along, so unlike Beth but so connected to her, it was like a resurrection, Cosima once said.  
“Beth…didn’t die of natural causes?”  
Cosima shook her head. And said nothing more.  
“But Sarah,” Delphine pressed on, careful not to upset Kira who’d been silent this entire time, “probably froze to death. You were both hypothermic when we found you, remember? And you were even dressed properly.”  
“Right right right. And Alison? Helena? Did you…do you know if—” Cosima asked.  
“Helena was unconscious but alive. They had her in some kind of incubation…thing.”  
“And Alison?”  
“We didn’t see her.”  
Delphine saw the glaze thicken on Cosima’s bright eyes.  
“But she died of ovarian cancer, Cosima. A natural cause. A disease. Something Westmoreland would have planned for. To study.”  
“Not just planned for, banked on. It would open up the possibility of defeating the disease that killed them.”  
“Or even better,” Delphine finished, “redirecting the evolution of future organisms—“  
“To be immune in the first place,” said Cosima. “An end to death.”  
Silence settled on the little family.  
“Hold on,” Cosima waved her hands as if to clear the air of flies, “How do you know all this, again? Have you been arranging secret chopper rides to that island or something?”  
Charlotte’s face flushed. She tugged on her left earlobe—a nervous habit all her own.  
“Well, um…that’s…another thing I have to tell you about. Er…we have to tell you about. I guess.”  
“Who?” Delphine frowned. Secrets are variables. Variables are unpredictable. Unpredictable is dangerous. She thought she’d ingrained that in her daughter. How could she….  
“Cosima, do you ever feel like…like there’s someone in the room with you? Like your brain is kind of…recording? Like a camera?” Kira said quietly. The first words she’d spoken this entire time.  
Even with a computer screen and thousands of miles between them, a line drew taut between them. Delphine knew immediately that Charlotte had spoken something unknowable to her. Something only Leda blood could understand. Like a secret language. Or a color in the prism of refracted light that ordinary humans could not see.  
“Yes,” said Cosima. Her voice was thick.  
Kira closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, exhaling slowly out of her mouth.  
“Do you feel it now?” she asked with her eyes still closed.  
“Yeah, actually. How—“  
“You bought a bottle of wine last night. You drank the whole thing, which is why you had such an intense hangover this morning.”  
Silence gripped the room. Cosima’s mouth stuttered soundlessly.  
“You miss Delphine. You slept on her side of the bed last night.”  
“Kira—“ Delphine started. Charlotte gave her mother a look: let her finish.  
“You bruised your knee running into the coffee table in your living room. It hurts.”  
Cosima had tears in her eyes. Delphine was putting it together….  
“324b21,” Kira said with finality. Her eyes fluttered open.  
Cosima stared at her in disbelief.  
“You can access our…all of our minds.”  
“And nervous systems,” said Delphine. “The bruise. The hangover. You can feel all that, can’t you Kira?”  
Kira nodded.  
“You’ve been—“  
“Monitoring,” Delphine finished for her wife. “Through their own bodies.”  
The enormity of it stretched the silence to its limits. It was as if the world became devoid of sound until Kira spoke once more, tears spilling down her face, her voice ragged with grief.  
“They don’t know who they are. But they’re afraid. And they’re in pain.”  
Charlotte took Kira’s hand. Delphine cradled her head in her arms and held her close, whispering into her hair.  
“We’re going to find them. We’re going to save them.”  
“Like raising the dead,” said Cosima.  
She was already searching flights.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cal has a bad feeling about all this. Delphine, in desperate times, calls in desperate measures.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go! Things get weirder but that's the OB universe for you! Thank you to all who left comments/kudos. Keeps me motivated to continue writing and stay as timely as possible. See you soon....

Cal paced around his tiny room. Some shit hotel designed for expressly this purpose: a place for asocial single parents to pace and pretend to nap while their kids were busy on campus at the Academy. The only time he ever left other than to go meet Kira was to go meet Delphine at that bookstore. What was it called? Arc-something. Whatever. 

He didn’t usually spend time in the dingy room apart from the perfunctory hours meant for sleeping, but Kira had all but banished him here after lunch.

He was worried. Their relationship had been…strained. To put it gently. For the past three years, every chance she could think of Kira seized opportunities to be closer to her aunts. And every time they would move close to them, spend time with them, the unimaginable would happen. First the relapse in Cosima’s health. Then Helena’s death. And then Alison. So hideous to watch: a sudden and ruthless strain of cancer. Cal started to feel like a bad omen among the Sarah’s sisters. He moved them away, back to his cabin. Off the grid and out of mind. Cosima recovered, which was lucky, and every time Felix planned a visit to their Arizona home, he offered to bring Kira with him. Luckily, Cosima had intervened.

“Monkey,” she cooed to his daughter, “the whole reason we left was to avoid having to explain ourselves. And now…you know…you look so much like your mother…. And Charlotte….”

Cal had been grateful for the break in being the bad guy, but it didn’t last long. In the same conversation, Cosima had suggested the girls be sent to the Academy. After that it was a full calendar year of Kira moping, pleading, and sucking up to him in a teenage cycle of pettiness.

In the end, he relented. Cosima, Delphine, and Charlotte were delighted.

“She’ll be safe there,” Cosima assured him. “And you’ll be near to her without…without having to feel like you’re in the way.”

She meant without smothering Kira. They both knew it.   
But it wasn’t Kira’s safety that Cal was worried about. It was Kira herself. There was…something about her, recently. Something she was keeping from him, he was sure of it.

More than once, he’d caught her in a sort of trance, staring slackjawed and nothing or sitting perfectly still with her eyes swiveling wildly under her lids. She’d said things—inexplicable, horribly detailed things—about Sarah’s life. Her fixation on her mother was understandable but unsettling. For years and years after Sarah’s death, Kira had insisted she was still alive. Every day was a report on her doings and whereabouts and thoughts. As though Kira had invented a ghost of her mother and could call her on the phone to hear about her day.

And then today. This bizarre story. The Lazarus Sequence.

“Let her talk to Cosima,” Delphine said after the disastrous lunch. “It may do her some good to talk to a familiar face.”  
“I’m her father,” he said, “I am a familiar face.”  
Delphine smiled gently at him. He could see her remembering her own family. Her own familiar. The boarding school. Those girls she’d told him about. Her friends. More of a family than her blood had ever been.  
“Kira’s family…” she said.  
“Isn’t me.”  
“It isn’t just you. It’s…an ecosystem. A—a—what does Felix say?”  
“A galaxy.”  
“Oui,” she snapped her fingers. “A galaxy.”  
He must not have looked convinced because she put her hand on his arm and ducked under his bowed head, catching his eye against his will.  
“Consider her life, Cal. Passed around. Hidden. Interrupted and stunted at every key moment in her development. She needs something steady. And to Kira, steadiness is rotation. It is…variety. And a mostly female variety at that. Living with just you…alone…isolated….”

It made sense, what she said. It was annoying that it made so much sense.

“You’re saying my daughter is a herd animal?”  
Delphine laughed. “Exactemente.”

So here he was, pacing a hotel room’s sixteen square feet for the sake of his herd animal daughter who was surely spending a blissful day with her female pack.

What Cal had not shared with Delphine or Cosima was that Kira may have run with the herd, but he was starting to think she may also be the wolf. He couldn’t express it exactly. Couldn’t pinpoint the sensation. Their isolation from DYAD, from Topside, from all things having to do with Neolution and Leda had been total. Complete. Impenetrable. And yet you could feel himself being watched. Monitored, somehow, without any interference to his life. He’d even made Delphine conduct and embarrassingly invasive but complete survey of his body to make sure he hadn’t been bugged.

“Nothing I can find,” she concluded. “Can you try, again, to describe the symptoms?”  
“They’re not symptoms. I’m not sick. It’s just…it’s like….”  
The closest he could come to it was likening it to a surge of caffeine to the brain: all of a sudden and all at once. Every color clearer, every sound and smell and sensation more precise.  
“So you get bitten by a vampire?” Delphine smirked.  
“What?”  
“You sound like a Twilight novel.”  
“How do you know what a Twilight novel sounds like?”  
“Cal,” she gave him a look, “I have a teenaged daughter.” As if that explained it. He had a teenaged daughter too, didn’t he? And he didn’t go around picking up bad vampire novels. Maybe that was his problem.

But the more important take-away was unsettling: he wasn’t not being monitored. He was not bugged. So why did his neck bristle and goosebumps erupt all over his body from time to time? Why did he feel that someone was in the room, over his shoulder, watching…even after Kira had been sent miles away to Vermont?

—//—

“Kira? Kira what’s wrong? Charlotte, why isn’t she waking up?” Delphine placed a limp Kira on the bed, brushing hair off her face. The poor girl had collapsed after the bizarre demonstration, and was now sweating and unresponsive.

But she’s breathing, Delphine reminded herself. She’s breathing. Thank god.

It was too familiar, this exact dance. Kneeling beside the bed of a weakened woman, not breathing out of fear, breathing out of necessity, heavy with guilt. How could she, Delphine, be so proximate and yet so unable to help?

“Maman,” Charlotte’s hand was on her shoulder, “she’s fine. She’s okay. This always happens.”  
“She does this a lot?!”  
“Oui,” said her daughter, switching to Delphine’s native French to calm her down, “we’ve been practicing. It’s how we found out about the other sestras. She goes unconscious while she’s synthesizing.”  
“Synthesizing?”  
“Like…downloads.” Back to English. A clunkier language but better for science, as it turned out. “Everything she sees and feels when she’s in our bodies sort of programs into her. It’s how she remembers for them.”  
Delphine chewed her lips nervously and studied the sleeping girl’s face.  
“That doesn’t sound right.”  
“We’ve run a lot of experiments, Maman, you have to trust—“  
“Non, Charlotte. I mean…I mean that can’t be good for her.”  
Charlotte blinked. This hadn’t occurred to her.  
“She never said anything.”  
“Of course not. She’s Sarah through and through.

Now it was Charlotte who stared with worry at her cousin. For the first time she tried to appreciate what it might be like to be exhausted by an excursion into the Leda mind.

“Is it distance related? Maybe…like jetlag?” Delphine suggested.  
Charlotte shook her head. “Maybe. I mean she doesn’t look like this after she goes into my head. But the island isn’t close.”  
“Closer than Arizona.”  
“That’s true.”  
“Have you ever tried to reach the South Americans?”  
“No,” said Charlotte, “She said she couldn’t feel them.”  
“But she can feel you.”  
“Only a little. But it’s different. I can feel her in my mind, recording. But when she synthesizes after…there’s something missing.”  
“Be more specific, cherie.”  
“I can’t be more specific than that. It’s a vacuum, that missing thing. The negative space has…has gravity, but—“  
“But no mass. I see.” Something occurred to Delphine. “A void.”  
“Avoid what?”  
“Non, non. A. Void.”  
“Oh, yeah. Like a void.”

They fell silent, watching Kira sleep peacefully. Or what appeared to be peacefully. What they hoped was peacefully.

“Explain to me again the Lazarus gene,” said Delphine after a pause.  
“Sequence.”  
“Sequence, then.”  
“It’s coded into the DNA. It can be activated but not deactivated, as far as we were able to tell. Like a power surge or a solar flare: it happens but it doesn’t last. It’s a jolt that…resurrects.”  
“And all the Ledas have it?”  
“Assuming our DNA is identical,” Charlotte said with a twinge of Cosima-brand sarcasm. Delphine, lost in a dangerous idea, didn’t seem to notice.  
“Let me make a phone call,” she said absentmindedly.

She slipped out of the room, down the hall, into the stairwell. Again: so reminiscent of every late night and furtive secret call made from grimy corners of DYAD and steaming Toronto alleyways in winter. Only this time in her daughter’s dorm building. On a sunny Friday afternoon. Did it make the stakes higher or lower, she couldn’t tell.

The phone rang once.

She knew she shouldn’t.

The phone rang again.

She and Cosima…they’d made a promise….

The phone connected.

“Bonsoir, Delphine. I wondered when you’d come crawling back.”

But promises, like life itself, was malleable.

“Hello, Rachel,” she said.


End file.
